Howard Stein Materials

 

Howard was a great writer of letters to the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. They showed the care with which he read everything, as well as his remarkable erudition. Here are two examples.

The first is a letter to the New York Review of Books (published in the issue of January 19, 1989) that he wrote in reply to an article by the great pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen. Though he had never studied Italian, Howard was apparently bothered by Rosen’s translation of a passage in the libretto to Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro.

The second was also submitted to the New York Review of Books, but not published. (It was much too long.) Here he defends John Milton against a charge lodged by several Shakeseare scholars.